Avi Wilensky: What are your plans to overtake the tough competition in the real estate vertical?

Michael Yang: In November, we became the #1 most visited real estate site, surpassing Realtor.com … We have a good aggregation of listings; homes for sale, rentals, for sale by owners, foreclosures and new construction. Our goal is to be the best research site for people in the market for new homes.

AVI: How do you stand out from other Real Estate vertical search sites?

MY: Well, first off, we’ve grown 80% year to year because we have new products coming out all the time such as guides and educational centers. We’re also open to feedback. At any time when we release new features, people comment on it. Further, we index everything everywhere within our other properties.

(After the jump: Yahoo’s secret search engine strategy)

AVI: Does Yahoo! Real Estate advertise with PPC on any other search engine?

MY: No, most of our traffic comes from organic search, press releases, and is product-based. We don’t advertise Yahoo! Real Estate via PPC on any other search engine.

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.